Including women’s work

Every murder is a tragedy. But we must also continue to look at the other, less public, kinds of continuing violence that make our nation unsafe, unhealthy and unhappy for many women.

Thirty years ago, Marilyn Waring’s book Counting for Nothing: what men value and what women are worth was published.

She documented the huge areas of important human work which were unpaid- particularly giving birth, baby and childcare, household management, cleaning, garden and farm labour, community service – and the fact that no consideration was given to the value of this work in the preparation of national or international accounts. Most of this work is done by women. And governments continue to count this work as worthless.

Marilyn Waring – now an internationally acclaimed economist and scholar – has just written a sequel published by Bridget Williams Books :

Still Counting: Well-being, Women’s Work and Policy-making. This shows that almost nothing has changed to affirm women’s work in the last thirty years. It is also a critical assessment of the “well-being economics” proposals being put forward by the current government. You can listen to Wallace Chapman interviewing Marilyn on RadioNZ last Sunday morning, 16 December 2018